Slow TTY logins due to generation of the packages-upgradable summary in motd on the login critical path

[Dave Martin]

Binary package hint: update-notifier

Ubuntu lucid
update-notifier 0.96
update-manager 1:0.132.1

Logging in via SSH or on the terminal has become a bit painful in karmic and later, due to the generation of the summary of packages upgradable and security updates to put in the motd (via pam_motd.so and /etc/update-motd.d/)

The symptom is that whereas logins "just happen" on jaunty, on karmic and later there is frequently a delay of many seconds while the motd is generated.

I can't see a reason to delay generation of this summary information until login time when the delay will inconvenience the user. An alternative would be to hook into apt to generate the relevant motd fragment when the package lists are updated.

Both update-manager and update-notifier are affected, though I suspect that update-notifer's motd-generation work is heavier and probably accounts for most of the delay.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for the bugreport. This is fixed in the latest lucid version of update-manager.